When was making the 4 spells for the game i had a vision of the lightning spell from the beginning.  I wanted it to be something a lot like force lightning.  the player would have lightning coming out of their hands and it would stun and damage all targets in front of them over time.  The issue with this however was A) I didn't have a lightning effect that worked and B) i didn't know how to do it.

So in the end i created an effect that would call lightning down from the sky onto enemies and stun them in a radius around the spell.  I was very happy with how it turned out.